15 Million Pages of Centuries-Old Medical Books Move to the Web

I am not sure how useful these books will be to genealogists. Then again, these are the treatments that your ancestors enjoyed or suffered with for many years.

Millions of old books are being digitized and made available on the web. The latest group of books to join the online library includes 15 million yellowed pages of text and images from arcane 19th-century medical books. Nine British universities and research institutions are sending their collections of important texts from the history of medicine and science to the London-based Wellcome Library so that their rare books and pamphlets can be made freely available online.

Over the next two years, a team from the Internet Archive will scan texts on medicine, consumer health, sport and fitness, and even outdated medical practices like phrenology, a pseudoscience based on the idea that a person’s character was reflected in the shape of his or her skull. Texts on food and nutrition will include about 1,400 cookbooks from the University of Leeds, according to the Wellcome Trust, which announced plans for the project in partnership with the digital tech charity Jisc last month.

Dick Eastman has been involved in genealogy for more than 35 years. He
has worked in the computer industry for more than 40 years in hardware,
software, and managerial positions. By the early 1970s, Dick was already
using a mainframe computer to enter his family data on punch cards. He
built his first home computer in 1980.